


Human Frailty

by polysyndeta



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, Background Character Death, Half-Sibling Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 03:10:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15855030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polysyndeta/pseuds/polysyndeta
Summary: Gavin wasn't all that surprised, when it turned out his dad had had another kid.  He wasn't even really surprised that, when his mom finally filed for the divorce she'd been threatening for years, his dad invited his half-brother and his mom to come live with them.  Like a reserve being called up from the bench.- A series of vignettes about Gavin's relationship with his half-brother.





	Human Frailty

Gavin wasn't all that surprised, when it turned out his dad had had another kid.  He wasn't even really surprised that, when his mom finally filed for the divorce she'd been threatening for years, his dad invited his half-brother and _his_ mom to come live with them.  Like a reserve being called up from the bench.

The first indicator that Elijah was different came in the way his parents talked about him.  He thought he knew the script for this, he'd seen it in movies and on TV, the way that anxious moms and guilty dads try to soften the blow of an invader on a child's territory.   _Elijah's your age, you'll be in the same grade at school, it'll be great, you'll get on so well -_

No.  Instead, he sits down with his dad and Ruth (who never really graduates from _Ms Kamski_ in his head) and she simply says:

"Elijah's a few months older than you.  He's privately tutored, so, you won't see him at school."

Gavin assumes this means he's retarded, but doesn't say anything.  It's a perspective he doesn't get any reason to seriously review when he meets him in person: pale, thin, taller than Gavin, with long curtains of dark hair and ice-blue eyes.  They're all traits inherited from his mom; Gavin got his dad's stockier build, his squarer jaw.

"You look like a girl," he says, an easy opening salvo, and he feels his dad's eyes on him from across the room.  They've been given a degree of privacy, but there's still an adult in earshot. Like they're puppies being introduced from different litters.

Elijah blinks slowly.

"Okay."

And that's it, that's their first conversation.

 

\--

 

Making the transition from only child to (marginally) younger brother would have been harder for Gavin, if it actually felt like there was another eight-year-old moving into their home.

They share a room at first.  Gavin - after some nudging from Dad - tries to socialise, but Elijah can't be drawn on the subjects that he talks about at school.  Music, movies, video games, football - Elijah will listen, absorbing information silently, but he doesn't render opinions because he simply doesn't have any.

Eventually, Gavin finds he kind of likes this.  In most of his other interactions, being heard is a case of yelling loudest.  After lights-out, now, he can lie in the dark and give highly opinionated lectures on Pokemon and Batman and Elijah just _listens_.  And maybe it's dumb, finding and exploiting the one arena where his brother is completely ignorant, but he finds he likes that too.

 

\--

 

Over the next year, or so, the subjects of their nighttime chatter grow broader and deeper.  They don't have the shared experience of school to talk about; Gavin is constantly at risk of repeating a grade, while Elijah goes to a place in town to get classes from a post-doctoral student.  It's not like Elijah's even any good at helping him with his homework; he doesn't get why Gavin doesn't get it, and his attempts at explaining things aren't made in language Gavin understands.  

But Elijah eventually gets nudged into making some efforts of his own, and he dips a toe into Gavin's extracurricular, pop-cultural worlds. At first, he's not a great companion:

_"This lacks internal consistency.  And the characters are dictated by the needs of the plot.  The reverse should really be - "_

_"Just watch the damn movie, Eli."_

But at last, he relaxes enough to be debate the relative merits of the Avengers and even starts watching hockey with him, although he seems to be enjoying it on some less passionate, more mechanical level.  Eventually he writes an algorithm to predict game outcomes, which enjoys a 65% success rate and lets Gavin clean up in a schoolyard gambling ring.

 

\--

 

Elijah's mom dies a couple months after his tenth birthday.  Hit and run.

(If you twisted his arm hard enough, Gavin might later admit this influenced his choice of career.)

Gavin never sees Elijah cry.  Never lies in the dark and the silence and hears the sound of sobbing being pushed into a pillow or smothered under a hand.  

"Do you ever miss your mom?" Elijah asks, one night.  For better or worse, the passage of time and the cover of darkness make these kinds of questions easier.

"I dunno.  I guess sometimes."

Whatever fond feeling he had for his mother has been consumed by his resentment that she just - left.  Another unscripted moment. No protracted custody battle, no insistence that _we both love you, Gavin, no matter what, this isn't your fault._ A hollowed-out closet, a suitcase, a cab.  His dad hadn't _won_ Gavin, he just...got him.

"Do you miss yours?" he asks, with a juvenile lack of empathy.  It seems to him like a legitimate question, even two months after the fact.

Elijah doesn't answer, and their after-dark conversation dries up for good.

Whatever _he's_ feeling, Elijah seems to allay it into a weird obsession with human frailty.  He buries himself in reading about dozens of ghoulish experiments into how a person's body responds to heat, cold, pressure, trauma, radiation.  As if he could somehow render himself invulnerable.

He half-expects his dad will have yet another woman waiting in the wings, but no, it's just them now.  Dad's not not unaware of Elijah's age-inappropriate preoccupation, but what's he going to do - install content filters and expect that to repel the likes of Elijah Kamski?  Please.

It gets to the point where Gavin worries that he might wake up in the middle of the night with his hands and mouth duct-taped while Elijah sharpens a boning knife.  It's just as well that Dad arbitrarily decides they're old enough to have their own rooms and finally clears out the spare.

 

\--

 

Elijah lives in a different world.

It's not just that he's smart.  Any asshole can be smart. Gavin doesn't think he's dumb, personally, although he probably spends as much time in detention as in class.  But then there's the kind of smart where you're graduating high school at twelve and authoring elaborate AI bots for fun. Gavin, who has never pushed himself academically when the bare minimum will do, doesn't understand his brother's obsessive  hunger for knowledge. For understanding and application. One summer he reaches near-fluency in two languages and then starts creating his own, complete with an entirely new alphabet, apparently for no better reason than to prove he can.

Things that matter to other people just don't register with him.  He doesn't have friends, but seems incapable of experiencing loneliness.  He wears his hair all the way down his back and kids (and some adults) call him a queer and - it's not that he doesn't care.  It's more than that; the words just don't register.

Their dad doesn't seem to know what to do with him.  He congratulates Gavin's paltry accomplishments, with the pride of an adult watching a child rise to their level, but what could he say to Elijah?  Never mind recognising his achievements - he struggles to even understand them.

Gavin thinks that Elijah doesn't care.  It's always so obvious that he's the smartest person in any room he sets foot in; why would he need that validating?  And then one Friday night, Dad offers to get takeout as a reward for a vanishingly rare A+ and Elijah just stands up and leaves the room.  

"It's like nothing I ever do is enough," he bitterly remarks, later when they're alone, somehow blind to the real problem: that _anything_ he does is _too much_.

 

\--

 

For all his talents, Elijah's not great at...people.

Like, all thirteen-year-olds are awkward, but this isn't that.  Awkwardness suggests that you're trying and failing. Elijah...doesn't try.  He can't (won't?) fake being anything other than a forty-year-old polymath in the increasingly tall and gangly body of a teenage boy.  Where other kids his age are trying to navigate the fresh floods of hormones, Elijah seems to find them more distracting than frustrating.  As other kids renegotiate their position on whether the opposite sex has cooties, Elijah uses a fake account to court seasoned professionals in  lively debates about machine learning on Facebook.

In the flesh, adults find him unnerving.  Children his own age might as well be a different species.  Gavin is - barely- an exception on the basis of shared life experience.  Elijah's onto his degree, now, remotely for the most part. Probably just as well.  God knows how a lecture hall full of insecure young adults would feel about the child prodigy in their midst.

One time Elijah comes home with a busted lip and broken glasses, courtesy of some of Gavin's classmates.   _Fucking nerd._ He seems more bewildered than upset.   _Faggot._ Gavin doesn't care all that much, but he beats them up the next day anyway.  

_Freak._

Matter of principle.

 

\--

 

As if he's seeking a physical outlet for his boundless intellectual energy, Elijah takes up running.  Swimming. Cycling. He'll disappear for hours, sometimes not coming home until well after dark, which would get Gavin grounded for days but is somehow a non-issue for his brother.  He thinks sometimes his dad forgets Elijah's age, that he still has all the emotional vulnerabilities of a fifteen-year-old.

Adolescence has been tough on him up to this point.  His growth spurt hit him hard and fast, leaving him almost six foot tall with a skinny, stretched kind of look.  Gavin, on the other hand, is growing sluggishly and on the chunky side (but woe betide anyone who says that to his face).  Elijah's abrupt and relentless exercising fills him out, putting meat on his bones, leaving him looking like someone you'd hesitate to card for cigarettes at the very least.

Gavin - notices.

Elijah comes home from a long run on a hot August day, striding into the lounge, where Gavin is sprawled over the couch with an XBox controller and a scowl.  His hair - shorter now, tied into a messy bun - is damp with sweat, and his white t-shirt is showing dark patches in his pits and between his shoulderblades. He smells of sour sweat and sweet fresh-cut grass.

He tugs off his sneakers at the door and meanders further into the room, peeling his shirt off over his head.  Underneath, his skin glows with exertion. There's still that slender boyish element to him but it's being defined, now, with thick threads of muscle.

Gavin's gaze flicks up from his idle contemplation of Elijah's nascent abs to where he's staring back at him, pale eyes intense and unreadable.  

"What the fuck," Gavin barks, hauling himself up into a seated hunch, leaning over his lap.  "Go get naked in your room or whatever. Fag."

Elijah peers at him a moment longer, then smiles as if Gavin's said something subtly amusing, and makes a soft _hnn_ noise which is the closest he ever gets to laughter.

That night, Gavin beats off in the shower, one hand braced on the tile, other hand stripping his stiff cock like he's furious with it.  And he doesn't think of anything at all.

 

\--

 

Looking back, Gavin hates the way people say Elijah _founded CyberLife at sixteen_ like he was immediately opening the doors of the gleaming Detroit headquarters he now knows and hates. Like anyone even _knew_ what CyberLife was until a few years later.   At first, he used his mom's inheritance and whatever else he could beg or borrow, sinking it all into a shitty ex-warehouse on the edge of town.  

He as good as disappears from home.  Their dad is, maybe, committing some illegal dereliction of his duty as a parent when he makes no attempt to do anything about it.

At first, it's just him and a few of his equally nerdy graduate friends, who have part-time or full-time jobs and drift in and out of the place while Elijah lives onsite (again, probably illegal).  He picks up scraps of freelance work here and there, selling it under one of his nerdpals' names so nobody has to know they're upgrading to programming written by a fucking teenager.

Up to this point, he's always felt more worldly than Elijah, in touch with the physical and practical while his brother dicks around with the artificial and intellectual. But now - what?  Now Elijah's gone and paying his own way. Gavin's still under Dad's roof, playing football at school to work off his Cheeto belly, getting home and playing video games. Eating food and wearing clothes and using minutes that someone else paid for.  Not knowing how to even pay an electric bill.

Elijah moves out, and takes with him a whole kingdom of experience that was once carved up between them.

He comes home to visit maybe once, twice a week.  Gavin wishes he'd just stay in Detroit. Dad has the cautious, I-don't-understand-but-I'm-trying conversations he's been having since almost day one. Gavin tries to avoid him.

"I don't understand what your problem is with me, Gavin," Elijah ventures to him, one night, when he's almost out the door.

Gavin clenches his jaw and punches the wall inches from his head, and Elijah doesn't flinch.  Elijah -

Elijah _smiles_.

 

\--

 

Once or twice a week shrinks to once every week, then every other week, then every month, and before you know it, it's been a whole year and all Dad gets from Elijah is the occasional email.

Gavin doesn't even get that.  But he doesn't need it, to keep fucking-Elijah-fucking-Kamski in his head.  He gets the ghosts of his adolescence, Elijah's toned body, the tiny hard studs of his nipples, the pale hairless stretch of his chest, the perfect skin all the way down beneath his navel.  And from there, Gavin's imagination takes over, because he's fucking sick in the head.

Time passes.  Graduate high school.  College credits: bare minimum.  Academy. Detroit Police Department, Elijah's goddamned backyard, because the universe hates him and it's the only place he could get hired.

Fuck girls, watch hetero porn, jack it in the darkness and see thin lips pull into a crooked smile.  Watch that smiling blonde bitch pop up on TV and be hailed as the first android indistinguishable from a human.

Watch Elijah Kamski tear apart the fabric of society and patchwork it into something unrecognisable.

Gavin wishes he'd do the same to him.

 

\--

 

It ends on the floor of Elijah's fucking ridiculous lounge, a room that could accommodate ten for one man living alone with his goddamned harem.  

Gavin's fly open, Elijah's robe unbelted, Elijah lying on his back with his legs around Gavin's waist while he rabbits into him with hard, snapping thrusts.  Hand gripping his stupid fucking topknot thing, using it as a handle to pull his head back, exposing the white stretch of his throat.

In case this couldn't be any more fucked up, the only reason he's here is to tell him their dad's dead.

Elijah looks...shocked.  Gavin doubts he's ever fucked a human.  He's still muscled and hairless - Gavin thinks he can see razor burn, fucking freak - and his prick lies hard and drooling, bouncing against the crease of his hip with the force of their fucking.

Gavin wants to bite him, savage him, leave him scarred.  Flawed. Finally.

He ploughs his orgasm into him, panting harshly, and Elijah puts his hand to his cock like he's only just realised it's an option and jerks himself to climax in three hard dry strokes.  For a long while, too long, they just lie together and share the same air, hot and wet with sex and sweat.

"I hope this has resolved whatever internal conflict you've been struggling with," Elijah says, surprisingly levelly.

Gavin punches him.


End file.
